Synology Drive leads a new era of file collaboration

Surpassing Cloud Station in every way imaginable

Reflecting our core belief that data should be accessible anywhere, Cloud Station offers a private cloud solution allowing you to instantly sync files across multiple platforms while retaining historical versions of important files for recovery purposes. Having served over 1.6 million offices and families since its debut 6 years ago, Cloud Station developed many advanced features to adapt to users’ various needs, allowing you to seamlessly access and sync files across NAS servers, PCs, and mobile devices.

To bring a more streamlined user experience and business-ready file server solution, Cloud Station has evolved into Synology Drive, which incorporates the main features of its predecessor with additional functions waiting for you to explore.

Ushering in a collaboration era

In response to traditional file servers’ disadvantage of meeting the rising demand for cross-device/off-site synchronization and mobile data access, Synology fills the gap with the advent of Cloud Station. But now, there emerges a growing need – collaboration. Nowadays teamwork requires higher levels of communication, and you may often find yourself having to edit the same document with multiple colleagues.

Get everyone on the same page – literally

Featuring one portal for file access, syncing, and content collaboration, Synology Drive was introduced to the market earlier last year to cope with the growing need for file collaboration. A growing number of businesses are starting to build an on-premises file server that can further realize anywhere file access and even syncing between a centralized NAS and multiple clients. South Africa Institute of Aquatic Biodiversity (SAIAB) is among them that adopted a file collaboration solution to help them streamline workflow. As for businesses with offices spread across different sites around the globe, they can also realize cross-office file syncing and sharing to connect distant employees in multiple office locations.

Fig. 1. Synology Drive 2.0 suite

Ready to take over

With the release of Synology Drive 2.0, the suite has been extended to cover every part of Cloud Station’s key functionalities. Moreover, the release also introduces several highly requested features, including On-demand Sync and scheduled backup from Cloud Station users. Both make it the right time for us to combine development resources into one and make Synology Drive an even more powerful solution – not just for file syncing anymore but for all aspects of file serving.

Because of this, Synology Drive will officially take over in the next major DSM release, DSM 7.0, where Cloud Station-related packages, utilities, and mobile app1 will no longer be supported. For users who stay in DSM 6.2 (a long-term support version), Cloud Station will continue to receive security updates until the end of 2020, so that businesses have sufficient time to plan for an upgrade based on their internal schedules. Additionally, for a small part of users who have been using Cloud Station ShareSync, Cloud Station-related utilities or mobile app with Synology Drive Server, the interoperability will no longer be supported in the next major release of Drive Server (i.e. Drive Server 3.0).

Preparing for a smooth transition

Cloud Station will go down in history, and Synology Drive will take over and become a constant companion that keeps you company on the road to efficient synchronization and collaboration. To help you effortlessly transition to Synology Drive, we’ve prepared the following two articles for you to make sure the upgrade has minimal impact on your current usage of Cloud Station: